J Allard, one of the most important figures in Xbox and Microsoft’s history, has now joined Amazon. He is now vice president on Amazon’s Devices and Services team, and he will provide Amazon with “new ideas”, he explained to The Verge.
Some of the products inside Devices and Sercices include Alexa and Echo. His boss will be another Microsoft veteran, Panos Panay, who previously was Microsoft Windows and Devices executive, and joined Amazon last year.
Born in 1955, J Allard joined Microsoft in 1991, and before Xbox, he was one of the people who pushed Microsoft into the Internet age, writing in 1994 a memo titled “Windows: The Next Killer Application on the Internet”.
Allard’s work on Xbox was mostly spent on software, as well as Xbox Live and Xbox 360. But he worked on other projects inside Microsoft, including Zune, an iPod competitor, and Courier, a cancelled tablet that led to his departure in 2010.
He briefly returned to the videogame industry in 2020, joining Intellivision for the release of Intellivision Amico, a product that never released. Now, this Xbox cofounder will work on Amazon, but it is unknown what he will be doing there.